In this brawny book, a full decade in the making, Anthony Fletcher explores what it felt like to be knee-high to the Stuart, Georgian and Victorian worlds. Previous treatments of English childhood have tended to emphasise the jolts and lurches as one period gave way to the next and anxious grown-ups rushed to keep up with the latest developments in parenting. One minute it was all about following Dr Locke's advice and bombarding your tabula rasa of a child with improving information about how to be kind to servants or do a passable translation of Book 6 of the Aeneid. The next moment Monsieur Rousseau was suggesting that you turn the little blighters out into the garden with the chickens and let them assemble their own education from a couple of twigs and some mud pies. No wonder adults tended to look tired and just a wee bit confused.

In this revisionist account, however, Fletcher argues that while the rhetoric of childrearing may have bent and shaped itself to every passing intellectual fancy, the actual experience of being an English youngster changed very little over a period of three centuries. Sure, your rocking horse might acquire a bit more rock, not to mention a real horse-hair mane, and your parents might push back your coming-out ball by a couple of years, but the basic social and psychic terrain through which you navigated your way to adulthood barely changed. For girls, in 1600 as in 1900, this meant submitting to a religious and social home education which would fit you to marry a man just like your father (but richer, hopefully). For boys, on the other hand, it was all about separating from home and learning a kind of masculinity that was only achievable by being locked up in a pseudo-castle and subjected to a punishing regime of homoerotic abuse, otherwise known as going to public school.

As this summary suggests, Growing Up in England is overwhelmingly concerned with the experiences of well-heeled juveniles. This isn't because Fletcher has blinkers, but because it is the letters and diaries of these kinds of people that tend to fetch up in private and public archives. Some of the material included here is already well known, and has been thoroughly worked-over before. Into this category comes Lucy Lyttelton's charming diary which covers the years of her tomboyish yet earnest girlhood at the heart of the Victorian Liberal establishment. Lucy's mother died when she was 16, leaving her depressed father heavily dependent on his elder children to help raise their 11 siblings. Lucy's diary lurches from whoops of pleasure at her brothers' success at Eton cricket to lacerating notes-to-self about spiritual backsliding (not for nothing was her uncle William Gladstone).

Familiar though it may be, Lyttelton's diary and later memoir still provide an important counter-weight to the received notion that young girls from elite backgrounds twittered their way through the 19th century doing little more than mangling the French language and plotting about boys. For what emerges again and again from material left behind by young diarists including Lyttelton, Sophia Baker and Louisa Bowater is an overwhelming sense of social and spiritual seriousness. For these young women, Confirmation remained more important than coming out, lessons were fretted over despite the fact that exams were unheard of, and mothers, governesses and the Queen were revered as superior beings who automatically knew best. More than anything, these girls longed to be good.

In fact, even when they fell in love, women from the gentry tried to do it without making a silly fuss. One of the most charming and moving sections in this book concerns the courtship of Clare Howard and Reggie Chevenix Trench who, reading between the lines, must be Fletcher's own grandparents. In 1911 Clare, fresh from her triumph as captain of hockey at boarding school, cast an approving eye over Reggie's tennis serve and sent him a congratulatory note. From there the young couple managed a muffled courtship which involved snatched meetings at railway stations including "Padders", and letters which had to be burnt immediately, for fear that Clare's five older and emphatically single sisters might get suspicious.

A year later the young couple managed their first passionate kiss in the billiard room and then immediately agreed that nothing like it should ever happen again, or at least not for another year, by which time Reggie might be in a position to propose. He was, and after the inevitable extra delay caused by the outbreak of war, Clare and Reggie were married in January 1915, three and a half years after falling in love. The fact that their first baby arrived just nine months later suggests that the wedding night was a moment of exquisite release. How sad, then, that Reggie never returned from the Western Front.

In comparison with material as rich as this, the over-reaching thesis of Fletcher's book can start to look a bit thin. For one thing it is hard to see quite how he is able to make his case for "no change there then" when setting childhood experience from the 19th century against that of the 17th. While the Victorian period is comparatively well stocked with girlish chroniclers confiding in their diaries, the early modern period remains all but mute. What's more, as Fletcher himself points out, while young women are enthusiastic and eloquent journal, memoir and letter writers, their brothers wouldn't be seen dead going in for something quite so cissy. As a result, the inner life of boys remains as opaque under the Stuarts as it does under Victoria. Whether this can then be used to argue that nothing much shifted over the intervening 300 years seems to me a slightly sticky point. Kathryn Hughes's biography of Mrs Beeton is published by Harper Perennial.

· This article was amended on Thursday June 19 2008. We originally misspelled Lucy Lyttelton's surname as Lyttleton. This has been corrected.